The Mill on the Floss

Chapter 4

The alterations of feeling in that first dialogue between Tom and

Philip continued to make their intercourse even after many weeks of

schoolboy intimacy. Tom never quite lost the feeling that Philip,

being the son of a "rascal," was his natural enemy; never thoroughly

overcame his repulsion to Philip's deformity. He was a boy who adhered

tenaciously to impressions once received; as with all minds in which

mere perception predominates over thought and emotion, the external

remained to him rigidly what it was in the first instance. But then it

was impossible not to like Philip's company when he was in a good

humor; he could help one so well in one's Latin exercises, which Tom

regarded as a kind of puzzle that could only be found out by a lucky

chance; and he could tell such wonderful fighting stories about Hal of

the Wynd, for example, and other heroes who were especial favorites

with Tom, because they laid about them with heavy strokes. He had

small opinion of Saladin, whose cimeter could cut a cushion in two in

an instant; who wanted to cut cushions? That was a stupid story, and

he didn't care to hear it again. But when Robert Bruce, on the black

pony, rose in his stirrups, and lifting his good battle-axe, cracked

at once the helmet and the skull of the too hasty knight at

Bannockburn, then Tom felt all the exaltation of sympathy, and if he

had had a cocoanut at hand, he would have cracked it at once with the

poker. Philip in his happier moods indulged Tom to the top of his

bent, heightening the crash and bang and fury of every fight with all

the artillery of epithets and similes at his command. But he was not

always in a good humor or happy mood. The slight spurt of peevish

susceptibility which had escaped him in their first interview was a

symptom of a perpetually recurring mental ailment, half of it nervous

irritability, half of it the heart-bitterness produced by the sense of

his deformity. In these fits of susceptibility every glance seemed to

him to be charged either with offensive pity or with ill-repressed

disgust; at the very least it was an indifferent glance, and Philip

felt indifference as a child of the south feels the chill air of a

northern spring. Poor Tom's blundering patronage when they were out of

doors together would sometimes make him turn upon the well-meaning lad

quite savagely; and his eyes, usually sad and quiet, would flash with

anything but playful lightning. No wonder Tom retained his suspicions

of the humpback.

But Philip's self-taught skill in drawing was another link between

them; for Tom found, to his disgust, that his new drawing-master gave

him no dogs and donkeys to draw, but brooks and rustic bridges and

ruins, all with a general softness of black-lead surface, indicating

that nature, if anything, was rather satiny; and as Tom's feeling for

the picturesque in landscape was at present quite latent, it is not

surprising that Mr. Goodrich's productions seemed to him an

uninteresting form of art. Mr. Tulliver, having a vague intention that

Tom should be put to some business which included the drawing out of

plans and maps, had complained to Mr. Riley, when he saw him at

Mudport, that Tom seemed to be learning nothing of that sort;

whereupon that obliging adviser had suggested that Tom should have

drawing-lessons. Mr. Tulliver must not mind paying extra for drawing;

let Tom be made a good draughtsman, and he would be able to turn his

pencil to any purpose. So it was ordered that Tom should have

drawing-lessons; and whom should Mr. Stelling have selected as a

master if not Mr. Goodrich, who was considered quite at the head of

his profession within a circuit of twelve miles round King's Lorton?

By which means Tom learned to make an extremely fine point to his

pencil, and to represent landscape with a "broad generality," which,

doubtless from a narrow tendency in his mind to details, he thought

extremely dull.

All this, you remember, happened in those dark ages when there were no

schools of design; before schoolmasters were invariably men of

scrupulous integrity, and before the clergy were all men of enlarged

minds and varied culture. In those less favored days, it is no fable

that there were other clergymen besides Mr. Stelling who had narrow

intellects and large wants, and whose income, by a logical confusion

to which Fortune, being a female as well as blindfold, is peculiarly

liable, was proportioned not to their wants but to their intellect,

with which income has clearly no inherent relation. The problem these

gentlemen had to solve was to readjust the proportion between their

wants and their income; and since wants are not easily starved to

death, the simpler method appeared to be to raise their income. There

was but one way of doing this; any of those low callings in which men

are obliged to do good work at a low price were forbidden to

clergymen; was it their fault if their only resource was to turn out

very poor work at a high price? Besides, how should Mr. Stelling be

expected to know that education was a delicate and difficult business,

any more than an animal endowed with a power of boring a hole through

a rock should be expected to have wide views of excavation? Mr.

Stelling's faculties had been early trained to boring in a straight

line, and he had no faculty to spare. But among Tom's contemporaries,

whose fathers cast their sons on clerical instruction to find them

ignorant after many days, there were many far less lucky than Tom

Tulliver. Education was almost entirely a matter of luck--usually of

ill-luck--in those distant days. The state of mind in which you take a

billiard-cue or a dice-box in your hand is one of sober certainty

compared with that of old-fashioned fathers, like Mr. Tulliver, when

they selected a school or a tutor for their sons. Excellent men, who

had been forced all their lives to spell on an impromptu-phonetic

system, and having carried on a successful business in spite of this

disadvantage, had acquired money enough to give their sons a better

start in life than they had had themselves, must necessarily take

their chance as to the conscience and the competence of the

schoolmaster whose circular fell in their way, and appeared to promise

so much more than they would ever have thought of asking for,

including the return of linen, fork, and spoon. It was happy for them

if some ambitious draper of their acquaintance had not brought up his

son to the Church, and if that young gentleman, at the age of

four-and-twenty, had not closed his college dissipations by an

imprudent marriage; otherwise, these innocent fathers, desirous of

doing the best for their offspring, could only escape the draper's son

by happening to be on the foundation of a grammar-school as yet

unvisited by commissioners, where two or three boys could have, all to

themselves, the advantages of a large and lofty building, together

with a head-master, toothless, dim-eyed and deaf, whose erudite

indistinctness and inattention were engrossed by them at the rate of

three hundred pounds a-head,--a ripe scholar, doubtless, when first

appointed; but all ripeness beneath the sun has a further stage less

esteemed in the market.

Tom Tulliver, then, compared with many other British youths of his

time who have since had to scramble through life with some fragments

of more or less relevant knowledge, and a great deal of strictly

relevant ignorance, was not so very unlucky. Mr. Stelling was a

broad-chested, healthy man, with the bearing of a gentleman, a

conviction that a growing boy required a sufficiency of beef, and a

certain hearty kindness in him that made him like to see Tom looking

well and enjoying his dinner; not a man of refined conscience, or with

any deep sense of the infinite issues belonging to every-day duties,

not quite competent to his high offices; but incompetent gentlemen

must live, and without private fortune it is difficult to see how they

could all live genteelly if they had nothing to do with education or

government. Besides, it was the fault of Tom's mental constitution

that his faculties could not be nourished on the sort of knowledge Mr.

Stelling had to communicate. A boy born with a deficient power of

apprehending signs and abstractions must suffer the penalty of his

congenital deficiency, just as if he had been born with one leg

shorter than the other. A method of education sanctioned by the long

practice of our venerable ancestors was not to give way before the

exceptional dulness of a boy who was merely living at the time then

present. And Mr. Stelling was convinced that a boy so stupid at signs

and abstractions must be stupid at everything else, even if that

reverend gentleman could have taught him everything else. It was the

practice of our venerable ancestors to apply that ingenious instrument

the thumb-screw, and to tighten and tighten it in order to elicit

non-existent facts; they had a fixed opinion to begin with, that the

facts were existent, and what had they to do but to tighten the

thumb-screw? In like manner, Mr. Stelling had a fixed opinion that all

boys with any capacity could learn what it was the only regular thing

to teach; if they were slow, the thumb-screw must be tightened,--the

exercises must be insisted on with increased severity, and a page of

Virgil be awarded as a penalty, to encourage and stimulate a too

languid inclination to Latin verse.

The thumb-screw was a little relaxed, however, during this second

half-year. Philip was so advanced in his studies, and so apt, that Mr.

Stelling could obtain credit by his facility, which required little

help, much more easily than by the troublesome process of overcoming

Tom's dulness. Gentlemen with broad chests and ambitious intentions do

sometimes disappoint their friends by failing to carry the world

before them. Perhaps it is that high achievements demand some other

unusual qualification besides an unusual desire for high prizes;

perhaps it is that these stalwart gentlemen are rather indolent, their

_divin* particulum aur*_ being obstructed from soaring by a too hearty

appetite. Some reason or other there was why Mr. Stelling deferred the

execution of many spirited projects,--why he did not begin the editing

of his Greek play, or any other work of scholarship, in his leisure

hours, but, after turning the key of his private study with much

resolution, sat down to one of Theodore Hook's novels. Tom was

gradually allowed to shuffle through his lessons with less rigor, and

having Philip to help him, he was able to make some show of having

applied his mind in a confused and blundering way, without being

cross-examined into a betrayal that his mind had been entirely neutral

in the matter. He thought school much more bearable under this

modification of circumstances; and he went on contentedly enough,

picking up a promiscuous education chiefly from things that were not

intended as education at all. What was understood to be his education

was simply the practice of reading, writing, and spelling, carried on

by an elaborate appliance of unintelligible ideas, and by much failure

in the effort to learn by rote.

Nevertheless, there was a visible improvement in Tom under this

training; perhaps because he was not a boy in the abstract, existing

solely to illustrate the evils of a mistaken education, but a boy made

of flesh and blood, with dispositions not entirely at the mercy of

circumstances.

There was a great improvement in his bearing, for example; and some

credit on this score was due to Mr. Poulter, the village schoolmaster,

who, being an old Peninsular soldier, was employed to drill Tom,--a

source of high mutual pleasure. Mr. Poulter, who was understood by the

company at the Black Swan to have once struck terror into the hearts

of the French, was no longer personally formidable. He had rather a

shrunken appearance, and was tremulous in the mornings, not from age,

but from the extreme perversity of the King's Lorton boys, which

nothing but gin could enable him to sustain with any firmness. Still,

he carried himself with martial erectness, had his clothes

scrupulously brushed, and his trousers tightly strapped; and on the

Wednesday and Saturday afternoons, when he came to Tom, he was always

inspired with gin and old memories, which gave him an exceptionally

spirited air, as of a superannuated charger who hears the drum. The

drilling-lessons were always protracted by episodes of warlike

narrative, much more interesting to Tom than Philip's stories out of

the Iliad; for there were no cannon in the Iliad, and besides, Tom had

felt some disgust on learning that Hector and Achilles might possibly

never have existed. But the Duke of Wellington was really alive, and

Bony had not been long dead; therefore Mr. Poulter's reminiscences of

the Peninsular War were removed from all suspicion of being mythical.

Mr. Poulter, it appeared, had been a conspicuous figure at Talavera,

and had contributed not a little to the peculiar terror with which his

regiment of infantry was regarded by the enemy. On afternoons when his

memory was more stimulated than usual, he remembered that the Duke of

Wellington had (in strict privacy, lest jealousies should be awakened)

expressed his esteem for that fine fellow Poulter. The very surgeon

who attended him in the hospital after he had received his

gunshot-wound had been profoundly impressed with the superiority of

Mr. Poulter's flesh,--no other flesh would have healed in anything

like the same time. On less personal matters connected with the

important warfare in which he had been engaged, Mr. Poulter was more

reticent, only taking care not to give the weight of his authority to

any loose notions concerning military history. Any one who pretended

to a knowledge of what occurred at the siege of Badajos was especially

an object of silent pity to Mr. Poulter; he wished that prating person

had been run down, and had the breath trampled out of him at the first

go-off, as he himself had,--he might talk about the siege of Badajos

then! Tom did not escape irritating his drilling-master occasionally,

by his curiosity concerning other military matters than Mr. Poulter's

personal experience.

"And General Wolfe, Mr. Poulter,--wasn't he a wonderful fighter?" said

Tom, who held the notion that all the martial heroes commemorated on

the public-house signs were engaged in the war with Bony.

"Not at all!" said Mr. Poulter, contemptuously. "Nothing o' the sort!

Heads up!" he added, in a tone of stern command, which delighted Tom,

and made him feel as if he were a regiment in his own person.

"No, no!" Mr. Poulter would continue, on coming to a pause in his

discipline; "they'd better not talk to me about General Wolfe. He did

nothing but die of his wound; that's a poor haction, I consider. Any

other man 'ud have died o' the wounds I've had. One of my sword-cuts

'ud ha' killed a fellow like General Wolfe."

"Mr. Poulter," Tom would say, at any allusion to the sword, "I wish

you'd bring your sword and do the sword-exercise!"

For a long while Mr. Poulter only shook his head in a significant

manner at this request, and smiled patronizingly, as Jupiter may have

done when Semele urged her too ambitious request. But one afternoon,

when a sudden shower of heavy rain had detained Mr. Poulter twenty

minutes longer than usual at the Black Swan, the sword was

brought,--just for Tom to look at.

"And this is the real sword you fought with in all the battles, Mr.

Poulter?" said Tom, handling the hilt. "Has it ever cut a Frenchman's

head off?"

"Head off? Ah! and would, if he'd had three heads."

"But you had a gun and bayonet besides?" said Tom. "_I_ should like

the gun and bayonet best, because you could shoot 'em first and spear

'em after. Bang! Ps-s-s-s!" Tom gave the requisite pantomime to

indicate the double enjoyment of pulling the trigger and thrusting the

spear.

"Ah, but the sword's the thing when you come to close fighting," said

Mr. Poulter, involuntarily falling in with Tom's enthusiasm, and

drawing the sword so suddenly that Tom leaped back with much agility.

"Oh, but, Mr. Poulter, if you're going to do the exercise," said Tom,

a little conscious that he had not stood his ground as became an

Englishman, "let me go and call Philip. He'll like to see you, you

know."

"What! the humpbacked lad?" said Mr. Poulter, contemptuously; "what's

the use of _his_ looking on?"

"Oh, but he knows a great deal about fighting," said Tom, "and how

they used to fight with bows and arrows, and battle-axes."

"Let him come, then. I'll show him something different from his bows

and arrows," said Mr. Poulter, coughing and drawing himself up, while

he gave a little preliminary play to his wrist.

Tom ran in to Philip, who was enjoying his afternoon's holiday at the

piano, in the drawing-room, picking out tunes for himself and singing

them. He was supremely happy, perched like an amorphous bundle on the

high stool, with his head thrown back, his eyes fixed on the opposite

cornice, and his lips wide open, sending forth, with all his might,

impromptu syllables to a tune of Arne's which had hit his fancy.

"Come, Philip," said Tom, bursting in; "don't stay roaring 'la la'

there; come and see old Poulter do his sword-exercise in the

carriage-house!"

The jar of this interruption, the discord of Tom's tones coming across

the notes to which Philip was vibrating in soul and body, would have

been enough to unhinge his temper, even if there had been no question

of Poulter the drilling-master; and Tom, in the hurry of seizing

something to say to prevent Mr. Poulter from thinking he was afraid of

the sword when he sprang away from it, had alighted on this

proposition to fetch Philip, though he knew well enough that Philip

hated to hear him mention his drilling-lessons. Tom would never have

done so inconsiderate a thing except under the severe stress of his

personal pride.

Philip shuddered visibly as he paused from his music. Then turning

red, he said, with violent passion,--

"Get away, you lumbering i***t! Don't come bellowing at me; you're not

fit to speak to anything but a cart-horse!"

It was not the first time Philip had been made angry by him, but Tom

had never before been assailed with verbal missiles that he understood

so well.

"I'm fit to speak to something better than you, you poor-spirited

imp!" said Tom, lighting up immediately at Philip's fire. "You know I

won't hit you, because you're no better than a girl. But I'm an honest

man's son, and _your_ father's a rogue; everybody says so!"

Tom flung out of the room, and slammed the door after him, made

strangely heedless by his anger; for to slam doors within the hearing

of Mrs. Stelling, who was probably not far off, was an offence only to

be wiped out by twenty lines of Virgil. In fact, that lady did

presently descend from her room, in double wonder at the noise and the

subsequent cessation of Philip's music. She found him sitting in a

heap on the hassock, and crying bitterly.

"What's the matter, Wakem? what was that noise about? Who slammed the

door?"

Philip looked up, and hastily dried his eyes. "It was Tulliver who

came in--to ask me to go out with him."

"And what are you in trouble about?" said Mrs. Stelling.

Philip was not her favorite of the two pupils; he was less obliging

than Tom, who was made useful in many ways. Still, his father paid

more than Mr. Tulliver did, and she meant him to feel that she behaved

exceedingly well to him. Philip, however, met her advances toward a

good understanding very much as a caressed mollusk meets an invitation

to show himself out of his shell. Mrs. Stelling was not a loving,

tender-hearted woman; she was a woman whose skirt sat well, who

adjusted her waist and patted her curls with a preoccupied air when

she inquired after your welfare. These things, doubtless, represent a

great social power, but it is not the power of love; and no other

power could win Philip from his personal reserve.

He said, in answer to her question, "My toothache came on, and made me

hysterical again."

This had been the fact once, and Philip was glad of the recollection;

it was like an inspiration to enable him to excuse his crying. He had

to accept eau-de-Cologne and to refuse creosote in consequence; but

that was easy.

Meanwhile Tom, who had for the first time sent a poisoned arrow into

Philip's heart, had returned to the carriage-house, where he found Mr.

Poulter, with a fixed and earnest eye, wasting the perfections of his

sword-exercise on probably observant but inappreciative rats. But Mr.

Poulter was a host in himself; that is to say, he admired himself more

than a whole army of spectators could have admired him. He took no

notice of Tom's return, being too entirely absorbed in the cut and

thrust,--the solemn one, two, three, four; and Tom, not without a

slight feeling of alarm at Mr. Poulter's fixed eye and hungry-looking

sword, which seemed impatient for something else to cut besides the

air, admired the performance from as great a distance as possible. It

was not until Mr. Poulter paused and wiped the perspiration from his

forehead, that Tom felt the full charm of the sword-exercise, and

wished it to be repeated.

"Mr. Poulter," said Tom, when the sword was being finally sheathed, "I

wish you'd lend me your sword a little while to keep."

"No no, young gentleman," said Mr. Poulter, shaking his head

decidedly; "you might do yourself some mischief with it."

"No, I'm sure I wouldn't; I'm sure I'd take care and not hurt myself.

I shouldn't take it out of the sheath much, but I could ground arms

with it, and all that."

"No, no, it won't do, I tell you; it won't do," said Mr. Poulter,

preparing to depart. "What 'ud Mr. Stelling say to me?"

"Oh, I say, do, Mr. Poulter! I'd give you my five-shilling piece if

you'd let me keep the sword a week. Look here!" said Tom, reaching out

the attractively large round of silver. The young dog calculated the

effect as well as if he had been a philosopher.

"Well," said Mr. Poulter, with still deeper gravity, "you must keep it

out of sight, you know."

"Oh yes, I'll keep it under the bed," said Tom, eagerly, "or else at

the bottom of my large box."

"And let me see, now, whether you can draw it out of the sheath

without hurting yourself." That process having been gone through more

than once, Mr. Poulter felt that he had acted with scrupulous

conscientiousness, and said, "Well, now, Master Tulliver, if I take

the crown-piece, it is to make sure as you'll do no mischief with the

sword."

"Oh no, indeed, Mr. Poulter," said Tom, delightedly handing him the

crown-piece, and grasping the sword, which, he thought, might have

been lighter with advantage.

"But if Mr. Stelling catches you carrying it in?" said Mr. Poulter,

pocketing the crown-piece provisionally while he raised this new

doubt.

"Oh, he always keeps in his upstairs study on Saturday afternoon,"

said Tom, who disliked anything sneaking, but was not disinclined to a

little stratagem in a worthy cause. So he carried off the sword in

triumph mixed with dread--dread that he might encounter Mr. or Mrs.

Stelling--to his bedroom, where, after some consideration, he hid it

in the closet behind some hanging clothes. That night he fell asleep

in the thought that he would astonish Maggie with it when she

came,--tie it round his waist with his red comforter, and make her

believe that the sword was his own, and that he was going to be a

soldier. There was nobody but Maggie who would be silly enough to

believe him, or whom he dared allow to know he had a sword; and Maggie

was really coming next week to see Tom, before she went to a

boarding-school with Lucy.

If you think a lad of thirteen would have been so childish, you must

be an exceptionally wise man, who, although you are devoted to a civil

calling, requiring you to look bland rather than formidable, yet

never, since you had a beard, threw yourself into a martial attitude,

and frowned before the looking-glass. It is doubtful whether our

soldiers would be maintained if there were not pacific people at home

who like to fancy themselves soldiers. War, like other dramatic

spectacles, might possibly cease for want of a "public."